Keynote Address by Bill Moyers

[Guest guest]

S

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 17:44:09 EDT

Keynote Address by Bill Moyers

 

 

 

 

Probably many of you have read parts of this speech. But here it is in

entirety and it is worth reading. This was back before election 2004.

 

 

***

 

Keynote Address by Bill Moyers

PFAW Foundation Spirit of Liberty Celebration

Los Angeles, California, September 21, 2004

 

 

 

Thank you. Thank you for that welcome, and thank you for that

introduction, Norman. It’s certainly better than what I heard after

I gave the commencement at Dartmouth a few years ago. A young woman

who had just been graduated came up to me and said “Oh Mr. Moyers,

you’ve been in both government and journalism. That makes everything

you say doubly hard to believe.â€

 

I’m here because Norman called. When Norman calls it’s the modern

equivalent of the light in the tower at Boston’s Old North Church

†" a signal no patriot would ignore. I’m here because Norman set

the bar for my work when he presented me the first Spirit of Liberty

award almost a quarter of a century ago. All these years it has

remained in my line of sight, in my study, a sort of Jewish guardian

angel if you will. Protecting me from despair when the going is rough;

from a loss of nerve when the heat’s on, from turning back when the

road runs out. I look at that across the room and think " Nah, Norman

would never forgive me the cold heart, so I’m not going to quit now. "

 

I thought of you, Norman, my friend, not long ago when I listened to

the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski after he received the Kluge

award in the Humanities at the Library of Congress. He reminded us

that there is one freedom on which all other liberties depend, and

that is freedom of _expression, freedom of speech. If this one is

taken away, he said, no other freedom can exist, or will soon be

suppressed. So when Norman calls, I answer. Pavlov wouldn’t get a

quicker response from his dog than my old friend gets from me.

 

And of course I’m always glad to be in California. I remember the

immortal words of Vice President Dan Quayle †" some of you are too

young to remember Vice President Dan Quayle - but he said " I love

California, I was born in Phoenix. " I mean, he really said that, I’m

not making it up. He also said " You know, I stand behind all my

misstatements. " I’m not sure which politician, though, it was who

said of California " This is the greatest country in America. " But I

have a very soft spot in my heart for Alf Landon who, running against

FDR many years ago, said " Wherever I have gone in this country, I have

found Americans. " No kidding. It happens to me every time I come to

California. It’s the damndest thing- Americans in California, it’s

amazing.

 

What a tribe of Americans you are, People For the American Way,

kindred spirits. I am honored to be in your company, and comforted.

You light up my life with the fire of conviction. No Americans have

stood more bravely against the judicial juggernaut of the Right Wing,

or opposed more courageously the Right’s intolerance, or fought more

steadfastly the encroachment of individual rights or the subversion of

voting rights. Can you believe what’s happening listening to Ralph

Neas a few minutes ago?

 

I was at Lyndon Johnson’s side 40 years ago this summer when he

signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The spirit of opposition to that

law is now running our government. I was there when President Johnson

signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The spirit of opposition to that

law is now running the government. You can never in a democracy take

any victory for granted. We thought then the days of voter

intimidation and suppression were behind us, but we were wrong.

 

Even as we gather here, as Ralph said, ugly, illegal and

discriminatory tactics are being hatched to turn Election 2004 into a

repeat of Election 2000. People For has documented these abuses. Armed

off duty guards posted at polling places. Anonymous flyers urging

whole communities to vote on the wrong day. People told they can’t

vote if they don’t pay their back phone bills. Fake Poll workers who

challenge and misinform voters. Voting machines whose manufacturers

make partisan alliances. It’s all there in the book Ralph mentioned

" The Long Shadow of Jim Crow " , and it's why your vigilance and

particularly why your election protection program in particular is

crucial to producing results in November that are as free as possible

of taint. They can never totally be free of taint, I come from East

Texas. I remember the poker player who said to his, across the table.

Play the cards fair Ruben, I know what I dealt you. I think that,

that’s probably consistent. I just hope you make sure you know what

you deal in November.

 

You’ve got a fight on your hands, we caught a glimpse of it at the

Republican National Convention, which the reporter Philip Gervich

described as " blood and fire and God and country and Amazing Grace. "

It was, says Gervich, a proper war party charged with the language of

Christian ideology.

 

By the way, if the Religious Right gets its way, November 2nd will be

a new crusade. This very week the Speaker of the House, Dennis

Hastert, and the House Majority Leader Tom Delay are trying to sneak

through a bill that would enable churches and other houses of worship

to legally endorse candidates and then support the campaigns and keep

their tax exemption. The House has defeated this proposal twice

before, but now Hastert and Delay are attaching it to a rider, as a

rider to a bill that has already passed both the House and the Senate.

The American Jobs Creation Act. The American Jobs Creation Act has

nothing to do with religion, but if the Religious Right can piggy-back

this little amendment to it, they will have a great victory without a

debate and without a vote, and it will greatly erode the wall between

religion and government by reversing the tax laws that prohibit

churches from engaging in partisan politics. The pews as political

precincts. If you thought Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell were holy

warriors, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

 

People have a hard time believing that I don’t make this stuff up.

But, one of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the

delusional has become marginal. How else to explain violent

exhibitionists and extremists blowing to smithereens hundreds of

children and teachers of Middle School #1 in Beslan, Russia? How to

explain the radical utopianism of martyrs who have crashed hijacked

planes into the World Trade Center? How to explain the possibility

that a close election in November could turn on several million good

and decent citizens who believe in the Rapture Index.

 

That’s what I said. The Rapture Index. Google it and you will

understand why the best-selling books of America today are the twelve

volumes of the Left Behind series which have earned multi-millions of

dollars for their Fundamentalist co-authors who earlier this year

completed a triumphant tour of the Bible Belt whose buckle holds in

place George W. Bush’s armor of the Lord.

 

These true believers to a fantastical theology concocted in

the 19th Century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate

passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative millions of

people believe to be literally true, including many of my cousins.

I’m serious. According to this narrative, Jesus will return to Earth

only when certain conditions are met. When Israel has been established

as a state. When Israel then occupies the rest of the biblical lands.

When the third temple has been rebuilt on the site now occupied by the

Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque, and then when legions of the

Anti-Christ (read Muslims) attack Israel. This will trigger a final

showdown in the valley of Armageddon during which all the Jews who

have not been converted will be burned. That’s when the Messiah

returns to Earth.

 

The rapture occurs once the big battle begins. True believers will be

lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven where seated

next to the right hand of God they will watch their political and

religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locust and frogs

during the several years of tribulation which follow.

 

You look skeptical. You think Ann Coulter is right to put her bony

knee into my groin? But I’m telling you the truth. We’ve reported

on these people for our weekly broadcast on NOW following some of them

from Waco, Texas to the West Bank. They are serious, sincere and

polite. Open and honest when they say they feel called to bring on the

Rapture as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That’s why they

declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed

up their support with money and volunteers. It’s why they’ve

staged confrontations at the old temple site in Jerusalem. It’s why

the invasion of Iraq was to them a warm-up act predicted in the ninth

chapter of the Book of Revelations where four angels which “are

bound in the great river Euphrates†will be released to “slay the

third part of men.â€

 

Because, the British writer George Monbiot has pointed out, for these

people the Middle East is not a foreign policy issue, it’s a matter

of personal belief. A war with Islam in the Middle East is not

something to be feared, but welcome. If it happens, they come out

winners on the far side of Tribulation, securely inside the Pearly

Gates, wrapped in celestial splendor, supping on ambrosia to the

accompaniment of harps plucked by angels.

 

One estimate I’ve seen put the number of these people at about 15%

of the electorate. Most are likely to vote Republican. They are the

core of George W. Bush’s base support. He knows who they are and

what they want. When the President asked Ariel Sharon to pull his

tanks out of Jenin in 2002, over 100,000 angry Christian

fundamentalists barraged the White House with emails and Mr. Bush

never mentioned the matter again. Not coincidentally, the

Administration recently put itself solidly behind Sharon’s expansion

of settlements on the West Banks. As more than one writer has

mentioned, the President stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging

Israeli expansion into the West Bank then he stands to lose by

restraining it. He would be mad to listen to these people, one of them

said, but he would also be mad not to.

 

No wonder Karl Rove walks around the West Wing whistling “Onward

Christian Soldiers.†He knows how many votes he’s likely to get

from these pious folk. By the way, Google it, the Rapture Index now

stands at 144, just one point below the critical threshold, at which

point the prophecy is fulfilled, the whole thing blows. The skies fill

with floating naked bodies and the true believers wind up at the right

hand of God with no regret for those left behind.

 

We live, you see, in a world infused with ideology stoutly maintained

despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality.

These ideologues, religious, political and journalistic, embrace a

world view that cannot be changed because they admit no evidence to

the contrary. On the door of their belief system, they have hung a

sign, “Do Not Disturb.†That’s why secular democracy is so

disturbing to them. You may have seen the recent nationwide survey

conducted by the Chicago Tribune. Half of those surveyed said there

should have been some kind of press restraint on reporting about the

prison abuse scandal in Iraq. Further more, five or six of every ten

would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech;

especially if it is found unpatriotic. Obviously, these are people who

do not want their world view disturbed by American exceptionalism. So

it is that war and ideology go to bed together producing secrecy as

their bastard child. As General William Westmoreland put it during the

Vietnam War, “without censorship, things can get terribly confused

in the public mind.â€

 

Right now we are witnessing a rapid mutation of America’s political

culture in favor of the secret rule of government. The American

Society of Newspaper Editors has published a report that lays out what

the editors call a “zeal for secrecy†pulsating through government

at every level. Shutting off the flow of information from sources such

as routine hospital reports to what the report describes as the single

greatest rollback of the Freedom of Information Act in its history.

 

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I digress to say that I was

also present when Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act

on July 4th, 1966. He said he was signing it with a deep sense of

pride. That the United States is an open society in which the

people’s right to know is cherished and guarded. But as his Press

Secretary at the time, I knew something that few others didn’t. LBJ

had to be dragged, kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony. He

hated the very idea of journalists rummaging in government closets. He

hated them challenging the official view of reality. He dug in his

heels and even threatened to pocket veto the bill after it reached the

White House, and only the tenacity of a California Congressman named

John Moss got the bill passed at all, and that was after a twelve year

battle against his elders in Congress who blinked every time the sun

shined in the dark corridors of power. They managed even to cripple

the bill that Moss sent to the White House, and even then, only some

last minute calls to LBJ from a handful of newspaper editors overcame

the President’s reluctance. He signed the fucking thing…I’m

sorry, you can’t sanitize some people! He signed the “F Thingâ€

as he called it and then set out to claim credit for it.

 

I dare say however that there never has been an administration like

the one in power today. So disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in

lock-step in keeping information from the people at large and in

defiance of their Constitution from their Representatives in Congress.

The litany is long.

 

# The President’s Chief of Staff orders a review that leads to at

least 6,000 documents being pulled from government websites.

# By executive order, the President arbitrarily and unilaterally

postpones releasing thousands of declassified documents.

# For the first time in history, the Vice President is given the power

to decide what is classified or not.

# The Defense Department bans photos of military caskets before

returning to the U.S.

# To hide the influence of Kenneth Lay, Enron and other energy moguls,

the Vice-President stone-walls his Energy Task Force records with the

help of his buck hunting pal on the Supreme Court.

 

# The CIA adds a new question to its standard employer polygraph exam

asking “Do you have friends in the media?†A useless question,

nobody has friends in the media today.

 

There have been more than 1200 presumably terrorist-related arrests

and 750 people deported and no one outside the government knows their

names or how many court docket entries have been erased or never

entered. Secret Federal Court hearings have been held with no public

record of when and where or who is being tried.

 

Secrecy is contagious:

 

# The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announces that certain security

information including the Reactor Oversight Process will no longer be

publicly available. Translation: you may not hear of nuclear leaks

anymore.

# The FCC restricts public access to reports of telecommunications

disruption because the Department of Homeland Security says

communication outages could provide a roadmap for tourists.

# Section 214 of the Homeland Security Act even makes it possible for

a company to tell Homeland Security about an eroding chemical tank on

the bank of a river, but prohibits the Department from disclosing this

information publicly or, for that matter, even reporting it to the

Environmental Protection Agency. If there were a spill and people were

injured, the information given to DHS could not be used in court.

Secrecy is contagious and scandalous.

# The Washington Post reports that nearly 600 times in recent years, a

judicial committee acting in private has stripped information from

reports intended to alert the public to conflicts of interest

involving Federal Judges.

 

I believe this zeal for secrecy, and I barely touched the surface, is

a victory for the terrorists. When they plunged those hijacked planes

into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon three years ago this

month, they were out to hijack our gross national psychology. If they

could fill our psyche with fear, turn the imagination of each one of

us into a private Afghanistan and themselves into the Taliban, they

could deprive us of the trust and confidence required for a free

society to work. They could prevent us from ever again believing in a

safe, decent or just world and from working together to bring it

about. By pillaging and plundering our peace of mind, they could panic

us into abandoning those unique freedoms -- freedom of speech and

freedom of the press †" that constitute the ability of Democracy to

self-correct and turn the ship of state before it hits the iceberg. I

thought of this during the Republican National Convention in New York,

thought of the terrorists as enablers of Democracy’s self-immolation.

 

My office is on the Westside of Manhattan, two blocks from Madison

Square Garden. From where I sit, I could see snipers on the roof,

helicopters overhead, barricades at every street corner, lines of

police stretching down the avenues, unmarked vans, flatbed trucks.

 

Looking out his own window, the writer Nick Turse saw what I saw and

more. Special Forces brandishing automatic rifles. Rolls of orange

plastic netting, drag nets. Pre-empted arrests of peaceful protesters.

Cages for detainees. And he caught sight of what he calls the ultimate

blending of corporatism and the police state- the Fuji Blimp now

emblazoned with the second logo NYPD, New York Police Department. A

spy in the sky outfitted with the latest in video surveillance

equipment, loaned free of charge to the police all week long. Nick

Turse saw these things, and sees in them the rise of the Homeland

Security State. Of this, I am sure, you can be fearful or free, but

you cannot be both.

 

If you are fearful, you put yourself at the mercy of priests and

princes and accept their conceits and usurpations as the health of the

state and the means of salvation. But if you are free, no one and

nothing, not even fear, can intimidate or subjugate or hijack your soul.

 

Robert Musil asks in his diaries, “Who among us does not spend the

greatest part of his life in the shadow of an event that has not yet

taken place?†He was referring to our mortality, but it is possible

that the fear of terror, of events that have not yet taken place can

produce an early and different kind of death. The atrophy of a

citizen’s soul. The acquiescence of Democracy in its own demise. So

it is that in the name of fighting terror, Vladimir Putin is shutting

down the embryonic shoots of Democracy in Russia and imposing once

again the iron fist of the Kremlin across that vast land and getting

away with it. Our own John Adams believed that a free people has an

indisputable, unalienable, divine right to the most dreaded and envied

kind of knowledge. I mean, he said, of the character and conduct of

their rulers.

 

That means of course you can’t have a press that drops to both knees

to take dictation from the powers that be. But we have seen the

seduction of the mass media into helping the government dupe the

public to support a war to disarm a dictator who was already disarmed.

And now much of the press is buying into the “war on terrorâ€

paradigm that our government, with staggering banality and stunning

bravado, employs to elicit acquiescence, while offering no criterion

of success or failure. No knowledge of the cost and no measure of

Democratic accountability.

 

This new report by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

documents how the public’s ability to exercise oversight of

government operations is being eviscerated to almost virtual silence.

When I read it, I was reminded of how the veteran journalist Richard

Reeves answered when a student asked him to define real news. Real

news, he said, is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms.

 

And I thought of that line from the news photographer in Tom

Stoppard’s play, “Night and Dayâ€. People do terrible things to

each other, but it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the

dark.

 

Can it happen here? Think Abu Ghraib. Think Guantanamo. Think WMDs

that don’t exist and intelligence claims used to mislead and no-bid

contracts that privatize war and enrich the privateers. Think of those

Patriot Act provisions giving government agencies the right to search

your home, office, telephone logs, emails, medical records, restaurant

receipts, library withdrawals, banking and credit card information.

Anything they want, without your consent.

 

It can happen here if the press is missing in action. Goes AWOL when

it comes to the news we need to keep our freedoms. The young America

grew up with a scrappy free press. It was cheap to buy a press and

publish your own polemic. The framers of our nation, however, never

envisioned huge media giants. Never imagined what could happen if big

government and big media ever saw eye to eye in putting the public’s

need for news second to their own interests and to the ideology of

free market economics.

 

Joe Saltzman, who is an editor of USA Today, teaches at the University

of Southern California here and directs a project for the Norman Lear

Center. Joe Saltzman put it this way. “Suppose you woke up tomorrow

morning to find that the news media in America had become a complacent

conduit for the government and big business interests, failing to

challenge authority and passing on information spun carefully by

special interests both in and out of government. Suppose you discover

that the major news media were owned by a few powerful conglomerates

that didn’t care much about the public interest unless it helped the

bottom line. Suppose all the news that was available turned out to be

harmless fluff. The weather, sports scores, entertainment features and

so forth, and suppose the majority of the news were given to you by

celebrity journalists.†Well, Norman predicted this years ago in a

memorable speech at Harvard, and as merger has followed merger,

reporting has been further and further pushed down the hierarchy of values

 

The big media owners have businesses to run and enormous interests of

their own that connect to public policies from antitrust to

deregulation, from the Internet and intellectual property and free

trade to minimum wage, affirmative action and environmental policy,

not to mention campaign finance reform, lest we forget where all those

dollars raised for advertising are spent.

 

So as a friend of mine says, the news business finds itself at war

with journalism. Whatever is more demanding, more complex, slower and

more prone to ideas, more challenging to complacency and authority

gets crowded out. This kind of cartel our founders couldn’t imagine.

Nor could they have foreseen the rise of a vast quasi-official

partisan press serving as a mighty megaphone for the regime in power.

But that’s what we have today.

 

Stretching from Washington think tanks funded by corporations to the

editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s far

flung empire tabloid journalism to the nattering know-nothings of talk

radio. A ceaseless conveyor belt often taking its cues from daily

talking points supplied by the Republican National Committee moves

mountains of the official party line into the public discourse.

 

And that’s not their only mission. They heap scorn on what they

call “old-fashioned†journalism and wage war on anyone who does

not to the official view of reality. This is happening as we

are being subjected to a disciplined, almost fanatical drive by the

political, corporate and religious right to transform the political

institutions, the legal and statutory cannons and the philosophical

and cultural frameworks that tamed the animal spirits of private power

and made America, at its best, a shared project. You see it

everywhere. From land and water and other natural resources, to

scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs. To the outsourcing of

war, to the press itself, a broad range of the American commons

undergoing a powerful shift.

 

At stake is the very notion of “We the People†as a spiritual

truth embedded in a political reality with Liberty and Justice for all

as its promise. And it’s happening with little public debate. The

Right Wing is achieving what only they themselves understand, mainly

because they are its advocates, its architects and its beneficiaries.

But I don’t need to tell you this, you wouldn’t be here if you

didn’t know it, and I guess I flew out here today not just because

Norman asked me, but to be with people who recognize that the America

of Norman’s beloved Declaration, the America where life, liberty and

the pursuit of happiness means rights for all, is a broken promise,

but it is not a lost cause.

 

Once upon a time, I thought the mass media, my industry, would help

mend this broken promise. After all, the sight of police dogs

attacking peaceful demonstrators forced America to recognize the

reality of racial justice. The sight of carnage in Vietnam forced us

to recognize that the war was wrong and unwinnable. The sight of

terrorists striking the World Trade Center woke us up from the slumber

of denial and distraction and I thought the mass media might awaken us

to the realization that the ideology of “winner take all†is a

dead end for all but privileged elites. I was wrong, with honorable

exceptions. We can’t count on the mass media, so we have to count on

each other. Who else is there, if not People For the American Way?

 

So I’m here to tell you the reactionaries are not going to win.

Remember what George Orwell wrote, “Power worship blurs political

judgment because it leads almost unavoidably to the belief that

present trends will continue.†Whoever is winning at the moment will

always seem invincible. They aren’t. So get ready. Whatever the

results on November the 2nd, you must see to it that the election is

not just the end of a campaign, but the beginning of the movement. The

fight’s just begun, and People For the American Way will lead it.

Thank you.